


Stronger Than Reason (the Bad Habits Remix)

by papyrocrat



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-10 00:45:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papyrocrat/pseuds/papyrocrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura remembers Richard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stronger Than Reason (the Bad Habits Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Picking Up Bad Habits](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/20825) by newnumbertwo. 



There's work to do after the attacks. Work to do, and given the numerous terrible alternatives, Laura Roslin is doing as well as could reasonably be expected. A young woman with dark hair - vaguely related to the Party, but Laura can't right now - comes over and shows them an inventory of supplies, and even ships.

_You're the president,_ Billy had insisted, _you need to have quarters_. If she didn't have cancer she wouldn't agree; then again, if she didn't have cancer, she's not sure he'd give a frak.

Probably he would. President, and all.

People tend to care about the president.

She goes to check out her quarters, and then reaches into her day bag to see what she has with her for the rest of her life. Her hands brush tightly-folded old receipts and keys that no longer unlock her bicycle or front door; she doesn't grab hold of anything until her fingers close around Richard's lighter.

His lighter; hers now. Not a particularly nice one, and it hadn't been of sentimental value to him or anything. Just something she'd slipped into her pocket and assumed he'd get back, sooner or later.

It has sentimental value to her now, though, she supposes. She remembers the last cigarette they'd shared, two weeks and a few billion lifetimes ago, at a conference on Picon. She'd been a last-minute addition to the president's entourage, an afterthought, a waste of taxpayer cubits.

She'd packed her travel bag then, the one she has with her now. She has three suits, a small makeup bag, a nightgown, and Richard Adar's lighter, for the rest of her life.

None of these things can have sentimental value. They are worth what they do. There is nothing else.

But a lighter makes fire, and that's worth something. She flips it open and lets him light up her bedroom, one last time.

*

Just before the 68th jump, she wonders for a crazy moment what they'd have all done if Richard had bothered to fire her when he said he would.

_Gods, if only,_ she thinks, and then pushes down her weakness.

He's still responsible for so many of her weak moments.

She braces to leave it behind her, in this corner of the universe. The Cylons are welcome to it.

*

She tells the gallant young captain some bullshit story about Richard's desk drawer.

She doesn't tell him much more about the desk drawer, how Richard would come to her on the rare days he'd used it, because what was one more mistake? Or how afterwards he'd wait until after she lit up a joint to admit why he'd come, not particularly thinking or hoping that she'd absolve him.

She'd nodded, and been supportive, and didn't often care enough to take issue with his confessions.

She doesn't tell Lee how the handle of that desk drawer felt against the back of her thigh, about the angry red welts it can leave on an undiscriminating woman. (For the record, heavy and cool and handmade by an Aerilon woodworker who was thrilled to be commissioned by the President of the Twelve Colonies. She's embarrassed to admit she knows how the artist felt.)

Lee watches her reach into her pocket and asks if she thinks they've made a mistake.

_No_ , Richard would have told the press corps. _Maybe_ , he would have admitted to her under a fog of smoke and sex and guilt. "I don't know," she tells Lee, and he becomes something to her then.

*

These frakking trips never end, not even when you live on-ship. She's making her rounds now, and she's put Tom Zarek off for long enough.

The Astral Queen had been a Colonial Federation facility serving four planets: Gemenon, Sagittaron, Tauron, and Aerilon. But everyone knows who really runs the show there. This is her meet-and-greet with what's left of the Sagittaron political structure.

_So your mother was from here?_ she'd asked Richard the last time she'd seen Sagittaron, a four-day whirlwind tour involving his campaign, her assessing the quality of parochial schools there (discouraging), and everyone giving Minerva Adar at least some plausible deniability.

He'd shrugged. _Ethnically, yes. But you know. Plays well. Makes it a little more politically palatable to condemn the extremists._

_It's not already palatable to condemn violent terrorists?_

_I told you you could talk like a politician._

_Is that what you think of me? I'd heard you knew how to charm a woman, Richard Adar. I'm disappointed._

Zarek knows how to charm, too. She thinks she hears Richard's smirk curling out of the radio, bending words like "statism" and "liberties" to its will.

That had been real, then. The accent. Maybe more real than he'd let on to her.

It's not as if he'd ever known her either, so that was alright.

*

Laura's been at Quorum assemblies before, but never run one. She hadn’t envied Richard this job, striding around gladhanding with confidence, delegating aids to make sure everything runs right.

But she’s the one here now, listening to Billy wisecrack about what Kalo would've said about Tom Zarek taking his place.

Kalo would have been pissed. He'd have made a few colorful Tauron remarks that could've been calculated to appeal to the general public, only they'd actually be how he really used to speak.

"He'd've gotten a kick out of Baltar, though," Billy continues, as if talking about a long-gone uncle who'd died peacefully in his sleep, and not the man who was supposed to pull the Colonies back together if Adar were destroyed in a shocking and tragic attack.

"Frakking Zarek," she mutters. The boys look a little surprised; Thrace smirks. Adar had hated Zarek, as a reminder of Adar's own embarrassingly idealistic student activism.

She hasn't cared one way or the other. Was vaguely relieved when he'd been sentenced decades ago, and hadn't thought about him since, except the irritable letters she got from time to time about his under- and over-inclusion in history textbooks. Zarek had been everywhere and nowhere all at once, more of a politician from his cell than she’d been from the capitol.

There's an old saying about the past being bitterly ironic prologue.

*

Her campaign for re-election is the first time she's actually run for office. She hopes to the gods it'll be her last.

Election, campaign, office; the near-archaic terms brush up against her memory. She hears Richard's voice in her head; cool and removed, probably not even much like what he'd really sounded like. _Representative democracy exists because the people know they need to give us a chance to save them from themselves._

Richard won’t help her now. This is wrong, whatever it is they aren't doing. Richard never would've, not for all his faults.

But Gaius Baltar helped the Cylons kill him.

This choice is Laura's. It always has been.

_No, Richard. Not this time. No._

She nods at Tory. _Yes._


End file.
